We have read recently Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). Holland has styled itself as the most tolerant of all nations--a kind of oasis of sanity in a crazy world. Now, however, its smugness has been severely dented. It has been, as the saying goes, "cruisin' for a bruisin' ".
Buruma writes:
Heinrich Heine did not mean it as a compliment when he said that he would head for Holland when the end of the world was in sight, since everything in that country happened fifty years later. Like most quips of this sort, it was unfair, yet not totally untrue, especially in the nineteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the Netherlands has pretty much caught up with the world, and since then things often happened earlier than elsewhere: tolerance of recreational drugs and pornography; acceptance of gay rights, multiculturalism, euthanasia, and so on. This, too, led to an air of satisfaction, even smugness, a self-congratulatory notion of living in the finest, freest, most progressive, most decent, most perfectly evolved playground of multicultural utopianism. [Ibid., p.11.]Now most of that self-congratulation has been rattled.
The assassinations of Pim Fortuyn (2002) and Theo van Gogh (2004) shook the nation severely. Now, like Sauron, it is gnawed with doubt. Both men had been outrageously provocative--deliberately so, in the attempt to make the point that pretty much anything should be acceptable in a multi-cultural, free society. Holland was to be the modern world's first libertine state. It was nonsense, of course, but their respective murders shook the establishment to the roots.
Buruma describes one of the most disturbing aspects of modern Holland--its nascent anti-semitism. He describes one football club, Ajax which has been identified with the Jews. Buruma and a friend had gone to watch a match.
The fans of rival cities . . . began to refer to Ajax as "the Jews," or rather "the rotten Jews," "the cancer Jews," "the filthy Jews." This had little or nothing to do with ancestry or with the war. Every supporter of the "Jew club" had to be a "Jew". . . .The question is begged: who could afford to be smug when this sort of crass behaviour is on public display? It remains, however, an apt monument to Dutch libertinism. A culture or society without a centre, which can hold all together, will eventually fly apart. Multi-culturalism--one manifestation of libertinism--cannot function as an anchor or a cultural centre. Rather, it functions as the exact opposite. All the ancient evils begin to climb up out of the pit once again. So passes Holland.
"Fucking Jews!" [the crowd] went again every time an Ajax player touched the ball, even if he was a black Surinamese. "Cancer Jew!" they shouted when the blond referee from the northern province of Friesland whistled for a Feyenoord foul. And then I heard it for the first time, a sinister sound from hundreds, maybe thousands, of beer flecked mouths. I didn't know what it meant, until Hans explained it. The sound got louder and louder: the sound of escaping gas. In Budapest soccer stadiums, players of a side owned by a Jewish businessman were greeting by rival supporters shouting: "The trains to Auschwitz are ready!" In the Olympic Stadium of Amsterdam, the fans were a touch more inventive. [Ibid., p. 85f]
Until it pleases the Lord to lift up the light of His countenance and turn His face upon the Dutch people yet once more. After all, this is the land of Erasmus, Van Prinsterer, Bavinck, Kuyper, Voetsius, Corrie Ten Boom and innumerable other faithful saints. We hope that in time the anger of the Lord will abate and that He would remember mercy for a land now in darkness.
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